Mental imagery has also been found to be a useful technique in clinical work. Researchers have found that imagery plays a significant role in emotion, motivation, sexual behavior, and many aspects of cognition, including learning, language acquisition, memory, problem-solving, and perception. These findings have been applied by educators seeking to enhance individual creativity in areas including writing and drawing.Īfter falling into neglect as an area of inquiry during the period when behaviorism was preeminent, mental imagery has become a significant topic of study for cognitive psychologists. New discoveries about the specialized functions of the right-and left-brain hemispheres have revealed that the right-brain hemisphere is the center for much of the mental functioning commonly regarded as creative: it is the side associated with intuitive leaps of insight and the ability to synthesize existing elements into new wholes. Creative imagination is the basis for achievements in the realms of both art and science, and students of behavior have analyzed the creative process in hopes of being able to encourage greater creativity through various types of training. At one time, daydreaming and fantasies were regarded as compensatory activities that had the function of 'letting off steam,' but recent research has cast doubt on that theory. One common form of creative imagination is daydreaming. It was this faculty that Coleridge called 'imagination' as opposed to 'fancy,' his name for imitative imagining. In contrast to imitative images, creative imagination is associated with thought and involves the restructuring, rather than merely the retention, of sensory impressions. Dreams are images occurring in a sleeping state that are usually not confused with reality once the sleeper awakes. Hallucinations are vivid, detailed images produced in the absence of external stimuli and generally confused with real images. Hypnagogic images are unusually clear images produced in the state between sleep and waking. A synesthetic image is produced by the conjunction of two senses such as occurs when hearing a certain piece of music elicits a visual image with which it is associated in the mind of the listener. Afterimages, such as the green image that appears after looking at the color red, are a type of imitative image and are produced by sense receptors. Among the imitative types of imagination is eidetic imagery, which consists of rich and vividly recalled images and is especially characteristic of children up to the age of six. One is largely imitative and concerned with mentally reconstructing past events or images. Send us feedback.Observers as diverse as Plato and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have noted two contrasting types of imagination.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'eidetic.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2020 If anything, my largest quibble with the show is that Lucy’s main skill as a historian seems to be having a near- eidetic memory of dates and names, when- let’s be real-memorizing dates is not actually what history is about. Marissa Fessenden, Scientific American, And so, now, all he is left with are his memories: vivid and bright and 98 percent eidetic, and not just for score lines but for sensations, too. Washington Post, Olson contends that Audubon had an eidetic memory-commonly called photographic memory-because the sometimes astounding positions of his birds have been verified by contemporary videos and photographs captured via telephoto lenses. 2022 Abrams also graduated from Yale Law and has an excellent memory, though not an eidetic one. Recent Examples on the Web Others have benefited from the club’s eidetic memory.

Eidetic imagery definition psychology